Reflections from Bill Simon

William “Bill” E. Simon, Jr. published his book entitled All My Love Always, Your Gampy in 2025. His collection of letters to his grandchildren took nine and a half months from the day we started the project to the day his books arrived. We asked Simon to reflect on what the publication process was like for him, and what it has meant to share his book with others.

---

1. What inspired you to write the book in the format you chose, when you chose to write it: 100 bound letters to your grandchildren that began seven months after the first child was born?

Bill Simon: The answer has two parts. First, I remembered that my own children were very young when my parents passed away. They didn’t have the experience of going through different situations with them. And at this point, 23 years later, my kids don’t remember much about my parents. I wanted to provide my grandkids (and my siblings) with thoughts on some of the experiences I’ve had in my life. The idea of writing something made sense, and it felt more urgent knowing that I was already older than my parents were when they died.

Second, my wife had asked me to write my memoirs and that seemed like a very large project. I thought that writing these letters might be a pathway in, kind of like an icebreaker. I found that it became a parallel path. I was working on my memoirs but felt like tackling an easier task first, something I would like. I enjoyed the letters because they were bite sized. I didn’t start out with the idea of writing 100. After a couple of months, I counted them up and realized that I had written 45, but I didn’t feel like I was “done.” I wanted the goal to be some fun, round number that would be enough, but not too much. As I went on, I began to realize that 100 was going to be it.

---

“I wanted to provide my grandkids (and my siblings) with thoughts on some of the experiences I’ve had in my life.”

2. Since your grandchildren won’t be able to appreciate your work for several years to come, whom else did you intend as readers?

---

Bill Simon: I have six siblings, a brother and five sisters. And the group of us has 28 kids altogether. At times while I was working on the book, they asked if they could see it. I told them that they absolutely could, but only after my own kids reviewed it and decided whether it was appropriate for other people to see. I’ve already shared it with a few very dear friends, because when you’ve been friends with somebody for 30, 40, 50 years, I think it’s fun to reveal something that they might not know about you, or maybe just to bear witness to life’s path.

3. In addition to photographs and paintings by your son, the book includes several original paintings of your own. How has this complementary art form helped you explore your life?

Bill Simon: My career focused on business, so I’m not one to do a lot of analyzing of emotions and that kind of thing. But writing, painting, and even teaching—I teach at UCLA and taught at Williams, my alma mater—help me to tap into another part of my brain. I’ve really enjoyed it. With painting and teaching, you try to identify with the audience. I’ll share some examples.

We feel very fortunate to live in Pacific Palisades, but we had fires in January that destroyed most of the town. We live on a beautiful street that I’ve gone up and down for 34 years, and I’ve made a charcoal drawing of what it looks like now. The tree in the foreground is one whose canopy extended over half the street, and the drawing shows what it’s been reduced to. It just looks naked, and the branches are very stiff. It was something to experience that type of loss and to deal with that type of grief. Charcoal obviously helps convey that. It carries with it an emotion of sadness.

Our house did not burn down to the ground, but we evacuated and are still living in a hotel. In that hotel are lots of people from our neighborhood and adjoining neighborhoods, and 65% or more of their properties have been completely destroyed. Many have lost memorabilia, things that really can’t be replaced. I have several photographs. One is of someone’s car—you can recognize it, but barely—and beside it is a very burned tree. Then in the background you see the figure of someone walking away with a roller suitcase. That says a lot. They’re in effect saying, “We’re leaving.” In that little suitcase is all they had left. These are environments of extreme destruction, and I’m drawing and painting these images. Different people will have different reactions. Some people will be mad. Some people will be sad. Some people will be spiritual about it—as in, “for everything there is a season.” There are a lot of emotions that people will feel, and that’s fine. I just took up painting a couple of years ago, and as I learned, I think I understood for the first time that you’re not painting something to tell somebody how to feel. You’re painting something to elicit an emotion.

4. While working on the project, and inviting your wife, Cindy, to contribute a letter of her own, what did you learn about yourself or your family along the way that surprised you or deepened your understanding of your lives together?

Bill Simon: I think my wife was more surprised than I was, because she saw a side to me that she hadn’t seen before. She was an artist before I was, and she’s done quite a bit of great work. I’ve always had an appreciation for my wife. We’re very close. We’ve been married for 38 years. She’s always encouraged me to be my best self. Sometimes she can be pretty critical, and I’ve had to adjust to that. But that’s okay; it actually does make me better. This book represented a fairly radical departure from other projects I’ve engaged in. I’ve written a couple of other books, but I’ve had important outside help on each of them. With those, my wife always said, “I’m happy to read your draft—if you wrote it.” And when she looked, she’d say, “It’s nice, but it isn’t really you.” On this project, I’d share with her some of the drafts and letters and paintings, but then she said, “I’m going to look at it when it’s done.” I think the idea that all of these pieces could come together as a book surprised her. I was with her when she started reading the finished product, and she was like, “This is really good.”

5. For the book’s dustjacket, you supplied paintings of the front of your home and the backyard, and Book Designer Nicole Miller developed a concept from there. How does the cover capture the essence of what you tried to convey with this book?

Bill Simon: The events that occurred with the fires have highlighted how important a home is, and, unfortunately, how temporary it can sometimes be. When I looked at the cover of the finished product I thought, “Thank God we picked paintings of our home.” Because, though it did not burn down, if I did a painting now it would be much different. The one on the front looks like a Leave It to Beaver or Ozzie and Harriet episode. When I was growing up, these were TV shows that opened with pictures of the family home. The camera would zoom in, and they’d open the door and say, “Hi!” It’s funny, because my brother always said that our house reminded him of Leave It to Beaver because everything has its place. It’s not fancy, but it’s warm and it’s a home, not a house.

We’ve had our home for 27 years, and our kids basically grew up in it. I feel very fortunate to have been able to provide that. Not that I did it alone. Cindy really deserves a lion’s share of the credit in terms of actually creating the home. But we’ve been parents together in a family that’s basically been in the same place for 34 years, since we lived in another house in the same area for seven years. And if that’s one of life’s important things—raising children—then I think we did pretty well. Our church is nearby, so we’ve got these things that have been part of our lives for a long time, and they all made their way into the letters. Home, church, the path of life. I’ve made plenty of mistakes, but I’ve got to think that we’ve gotten a few things right.

---

Liz Sonnenberg is staff genealogist for Modern Memoirs, Inc.

Reflections from Stephen Rostand

Dr. Stephen Rostand is a repeat client with Modern Memoirs. His photography book entitled Mostly Paris was his first project, and it came out in 2007. The second book, a department history entitled The Division of Nephrology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, 1958–2008, Fifty Years of Excellence, was published in 2014 and reprinted in 2019. The third book, a family history book entitled Photographs and Memories: Our Family History, was published in 2020.

We asked the author to reflect on what the publication process was like for him for these three very different books, and what it has meant to share them with others.

1.  While you are an M.D. by profession, your hobby/passion is photography. What prompted you to have a sampling of original 8x10 glossy prints transformed into a book? Do you have a favorite photo or two in this collection?

Stephen Rostand: I have been actively photographing for at least 50 years. During that time, I have accumulated thousands of photographs and have reduced the number to those that I think are exceptional. At one point I started considering what to do with them and how to preserve them for family and friends who seemed to like them. I had been to many photo exhibitions and had also seen the works of well-known photographers in books. I felt that many of my photographs were as good as theirs, and that gave me the idea for a book in which I could preserve the best of them. However, because I am a private person, I had to overcome my initial reluctance to expose my inner self to others. After all, what is the photograph but a projection of the photographer, his/her vision, viewpoint, and attitude towards the subject? The photographer is the photograph and vice-versa. It took me about a year to further winnow the photographs, select or write commentary to accompany those photographs, and find someone to produce the book. I was fortunate to find Modern Memoirs through their small ad in The New Yorker. They produced a magnificent book that is, in itself, a work of art. I have distributed the books as gifts to family and friends in the United States and Europe. It’s hard to answer which photo is my favorite because, truthfully, all of them are. Each one represents something different, and I cannot select one over another. It’s like asking who your favorite child is.

2.  Your department history is shared with students, colleagues, and residents of the Division of Nephrology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. What sort of feedback have you received from your book’s readers? How does providing them with this institutional knowledge enhance their studies and their practice?

Stephen Rostand: When I retired after nearly 40 years on the faculty, my director asked me if I would write a history of our division. I had been one of the original members of the division and had participated in its growth and subsequent importance. Having majored in history in college and having read many historical works, I was flattered and eager to do it. More than a chronology or collection of anecdotes, I decided to write a historical narrative that spanned 50 years, from the beginning of our division to the arrival of the chief who asked me to write the story. I used the university archives, interviewed past and present colleagues, discussed some of the university politics affecting our division, and dealt with some very sensitive issues involving people who were still on the faculty. It took nearly three years to research and writing. To say the least, it was very well received and has been distributed to all our past trainees, the dean, university president, visiting faculty, and each trainee at the time of their graduation. It also serves a public relations function for our division. Although the book is not meant to help our graduates in their medical practice, many of our graduates are bench researchers. It describes the evolution of our field, the growth and development of our division, its faculty, and how the division was managed through a variety of difficult problems and gained its national prominence. It is instructive about how to grow a successful group and it should give our graduates a sense of pride for having been associated with the program.

3.  Your third book, Photographs and Memories, is a lovely blend of genealogy, historical context, and personal story. It includes genealogy charts, many photographs, and an appendix of “legendary” anecdotes. What did you learn about gathering a family’s history into one book, and what advice do you have for others who may be considering a similar project?

Stephen Rostand: Writing a family history requires time, attention to detail, persistence, objectivity, tact, understanding of what kind of history you wish to write, and what its goal is. Will it be an attempt to find and catalog every member of your immediate and distant family? Or will it be a more personal, intimate look at who and what kind of people your first-degree relatives were? You will need to determine if there are any existing documents and photographs of past and present family. If there are living parents and grandparents, try to interview them. Include aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, and anyone who knew them well. Draw on your own memories as well. Also remember that your childhood impressions of your parents, grandparents, and other family members may well be different from your opinions as an adult. Thus, make sure that what you write is objective or else you may create friction and enemies in the family. If necessary, you may need to get help with your genealogical research.

4.  After previously completing two very different books, why did you add this third book to the collection? Why was it important to you that you record your family history?

Stephen Rostand: As I wrote in the preface to my family history, “Our worst fear may not be death but rather the loss of memory. Life is short, memory fleeting, and the nuclear family temporary and centrifugal. Over time we disperse.” After several generations we become strangers. I wanted to make sure my children and grandchildren and cousins knew something about their origins so they would not be orphans in history. After all, our past is part of all of us and knowing who we are should help guide us in the future. As I am nearing the end of my life, I thought this history would be an important gift to pass on. I was fortunate to have all the notes my father took when he interviewed his family when he was a young man and to have various documents and the family photo album that contains photos going back to 1898. Because these important items are not in the best condition, I felt they should be preserved. It was for these reasons that I wrote the family history.

5.  How did the writing process itself help you reflect upon or uncover insights into the people and events you wrote about?

Stephen Rostand: In writing the family history I was able to reassess my parents’, grandparents’, aunts’, and uncles’ lives by placing them in historical context and seeing their growth and development through photographs. It gave me an adult perspective of my forbears, an opportunity, for the first time, to understand the complex relationships between our families, and to understand myself and my relationships better. It also brought me in contact with more distant family members whose history I could only touch on peripherally and superficially. These relatives provided me with additional details of our genealogical tree and sent me the personal memoirs of at least one family member whose experiences living in Europe from 1910 until 1949 were fascinating. Unfortunately, it arrived in my hands well after my history was published. Thus, a written family history is part of a continuum and is never really completed. Mine was written in the hope that one of my children would continue the story.

Reflections from Hilde Adler

Hilde Adler is a repeat client with Modern Memoirs. Her first book, a memoir entitled The Way It Was: not so long ago in a country not so far away, came out in 2011 and underwent several subsequent editions and reprints. It took eight months from the day Adler first contacted us to the day the books arrived on her doorstep.

The second book, entitled I Am Not Old Enough: The Twenty-seven Stages of Adjustment to Living in a Retirement Community, was published in 2019. It took only two and a half months to publish, and Adler opted for print-on-demand service with global distribution, which has allowed her to personally sell many copies. (Interested readers can purchase copies at this link.) We asked the author to reflect on what the publication process was like for her, and what it has meant to share her books with others.

1.  Your first book is an account of your family’s life in Germany before you came, as refugees, to the United States at the start of World War II. It features descriptions of your home in Nürnberg, your family members, holidays, school, and some of the events leading up to the war. It briefly covers your family’s departure from Germany and resettlement in the United States, and it includes photographs. In the introduction to the book, you note that hundreds of books have been dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust, but that “hardly anyone thinks about the life of Germany’s Jews before Hitler.” What inspired you to write this memoir, to do this sort of remembering? For whom did you write it?

Hilde Adler: Because of my own history, I’ve done a lot of reading about the 2,000-year history of the Jews in Europe, and have come to understand how remarkable Jewish life was in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. My family inherited this life; they felt totally German, totally integrated into the society and completely immersed in the German culture. I wrote this book because I wanted my friends and my very scattered-around-the-world family not only to honor and remember the tragedies and lives lost in the Holocaust, but also to understand something about the amazing, productive life that Germany’s Jews created and lived, and that came to end because of the Nazis. I wanted to honor my parents and their whole generation.

2.  People often talk about the role of objects in memory. In The Way It Was, you describe how your family lost most of their possessions and heirlooms when they were either destroyed during Kristallnacht, stolen by the Nazis, or sunken on a ship that was bombed. How has writing your memoir helped you think about your relationship with objects, and family mementos in particular?

Hilde Adler: Interesting that you should ask this, because for some years now, I’ve been trying to finish a manuscript about how things that once belonged to our parents or grandparents, or others in those generations, connect us to our family history! I do have some mementos, courtesy of my grandmother, who left Germany earlier than we did and managed to get some things out. And for the last 83 years, a little black toy dog, which my parents gave me the day we left to replace my real little black dog who had to stay behind, has lived on my bedroom dresser no matter where I’ve lived! The connection of these things to the past is palpable.

3.  Your second book is completely different from the first. It’s a humorous look at the evolution of your feelings about moving into a retirement community, documenting how you hated leaving your old home, yet came to love your new one. This book is written in two voices, one you call “normal blathering me” and the other, your “reality check” voice, and it includes cartoon drawings. Besides wanting to describe what life is like in a retirement community, why was it important to you to write this book?

Hilde Adler: After we moved to the retirement community, our former neighbors and other friends constantly wanted to talk about our move. I was always trying to convey that this move was not as tragic as they perceived it. The conversation happened so often that eventually I made a list, and the book grew out of that. The stages as well as the voices are real and universal. We’d all rather deny that we’re old enough for this adventure, but at the same time we all know better. I thought if I was honest, people could relate and would believe me.

4.  As widely different as these two books are, they share some surprising themes. One is the meaning of home. How has writing helped you come to a better understanding of the meaning and creation of home?

Hilde Adler: I’m actually fairly obsessed with the concept of home, probably because I don’t have one. I bring it up in conversations when I can, trying to understand how others perceive “home.” At age 10, I lost what I thought was home (although it wasn’t! They would have killed me!). Writing revives some memories. But I’ve never found “home.”

5.  Another related theme is the question of belonging. In fact, in both books you repeat the same question, noting that even “in the midst of beloved people” and even when you were enveloped in perfectly enjoyable surroundings, you sometimes found yourself asking, “What am I doing here?” How has writing helped you reflect on these complicated feelings about community and belonging?

Hilde Adler: This is not related to writing for me. It has to do with the immigrant experience, which is different for those who come to another place for a better life than for those who are fleeing persecution. Even though I seem to have lived a “perfect, typical American girl” sort of life, I think subconsciously I’ve always been a displaced person! A realization that there is no shared history with anyone around surfaces at unexpected times and can cause a feeling of profound isolation. You “wanna go home now,” but there’s no place to go! It is what it is.

Interested in reading more? Readers can purchase Hilde Adler’s second book at the link below:

The Write Stuff: The Value of Transcription in Genealogical Research

Just as drawing can help someone truly see an object, transcribing a handwritten document into typed text can help a person truly read it. That is why I encourage clients to take the time to key in the text of handwritten genealogical records they gather in their research. Whether it’s a census record, passenger list, or deed, transcribing documents into word processing software or a spreadsheet not only puts research on solid footing, it just might also provide leads for further exploration.

Don’t let the task intimidate you! Handwriting from centuries ago can be very difficult to read, with letter shapes, punctuation, and turns of phrase that may be unfamiliar. Messy handwriting and poor image quality often make the work that much harder. But with a little bit of study and the mastery of certain tricks (such as finding the same or similar letters in other parts of the document, looking up guessed-at words and names online, and recognizing templated text), you can soon decipher more than you thought you could.

I have extensive experience with transcribing genealogical records and other historical documents. This work includes a three-year batch of letters from a Civil War soldier, and a series of courtship letters from a 19th-century widower to his future second wife. If you feel daunted by tackling transcription on your own, consider getting started by engaging Modern Memoirs’ transcription services. We can help you advance your research by bringing important details into focus, which may uncover something entirely new.

Transcribing documents is valuable because it (literally) spells out the key information needed to study the events of an ancestor’s life: their name in all its variations; age; birthplace; occupation; and nuclear family members. Transcription highlights the consistencies between documents that confirm that the same (correct) individual or family group is studied over time, while also revealing any inconsistencies that need to be investigated and explained. Additionally, transcription prompts the organization of findings to formulate a timeline of an ancestor’s life while putting research findings into a format that can be searched by you and shared with others. But what’s more, transcribing documents may end up illuminating additional, helpful pieces of information held in the original documents.

For example, a census listing might reveal the name of a boarder who turns out to be one of your ancestor’s previously “lost” nephews. Or perhaps a marriage record will reveal a witness who turns up as the caretaker of the couple’s orphaned children later in life. Or maybe a deed names an abutting neighbor who migrated with your ancestor from one section of the country to another.

In other words, transcription may assist you with direct ancestry research while also providing information about extended family, friends, and associates that can indirectly take research to a whole new level. I am eager to help Modern Memoirs clients with this rewarding work, whether or not it leads to a larger book-publishing project.

1900 U.S. census for Lamotte, Jackson County, Iowa. This section shows Henry, Mary, Emma, and Frederich Ahlers. Henry and Mary are two of my maternal great-great grandparents and Frederich was their son (my great-grandfather). I transcribed Frederich’s name with an “h” at the end, even though Ancestry.com indexed it with a “k.” That’s because, elsewhere on the page, I noticed that the census taker wrote the letter “k” very distinctly in the word “clerk” and it doesn’t look like the ending of “Frederich.” See below.

Reflections from Kevin Albert

Kevin Albert’s wife, Mary Albert, commissioned a memoir for him as a birthday gift the year that he retired. He published his book entitled Work Hard, Get Lucky: A Memoir with Modern Memoirs in 2021. This Commissioned Memoir included genealogical research and took 18 months from the day Mary first contacted us to the day books arrived on their doorstep. We asked Kevin and Mary to reflect on what the publication process was like for them, and what it has meant to share his books with others.

1.  The opportunity to write a memoir was a birthday gift to you from your wife, Mary. In the opening pages of the book, you say that memoir-writing was not something you ever thought you would want to do. In fact, you say it even seemed a little “pretentious.” What made you change your mind? 

Kevin Albert: I still believe it’s a little pretentious to think that anybody outside of my family and close circle of friends would want to read it. I wasn’t Paul Volcker, or Bill Clinton, or another famous person who contributed a lot to society overall. I’ve been successful, but I’ve been successful in a way that hasn’t necessarily been super meaningful for the rest of the world. So I decided to embrace a finite view of who might be interested in reading the memoir and thought about it in terms of the impact it could have on close associates, my family, and particularly my grandchildren, who are still young enough to learn lessons or get motivated about being successful in this world.

Then, by expanding the project to include genealogical research, I hoped the book would become more interesting for cousins and people who aren’t in the inner circle but are in the same family. Take, for example, my cousin in Texas, who actually helped provide documentation for the family history section. We got together with her at a family reunion in Wisconsin last August, and I finally gave a copy of the book to her in person. She really appreciates it.

2. Once you decided to do it, what were the main objectives you intended to accomplish in writing a memoir?

Kevin Albert: Initially and most importantly, I decided to try and elicit from the aspects of my life that were successful the reasons why they were successful, so that readers (particularly my grandkids) could benefit from this and be inspired by it. The second thing that came out of the whole process was that it made me remember people from much earlier in my life when I was growing up in Wisconsin and then when I went to college and graduate school in California. I hadn’t really maintained relationships with them, and talking about them in the interviews reminded me of the good times we had and the ways in which they helped me. I’m resolved to reach out to those people and try to reconnect. Finally, adding on the genealogy research was a great decision. I had never done any family history research before, and I think that anybody who does a memoir should include family history because it really makes it a complete package for subsequent generations.

3. Yours was a Commissioned Memoir, which means that we generated the initial text from a series of interviews with you, and then worked closely with you as we completed each editorial and design step. How did the creation process help you achieve the results you were looking for?

Kevin Albert: If I had just sat down to write a memoir on my own, it would’ve been a much different and less fulsome document. That’s because Modern Memoirs has developed a model for how to start with interviews and then edit the transcripts, and Megan [St. Marie, interviewer and editor] is very good at it. There’s a risk when you write a memoir and talk about all the good things in your life, the things you achieved, and so on, that it could seem a little braggy. It was painstaking to sit with Megan and have her go into every nook and cranny of my life—religion, schooling, siblings—but I probably would’ve skipped over a lot of that stuff on my own. She got a lot of material out of me that wouldn’t have otherwise come out. It was hard to deal with that raw transcript when they first transcribed all the material from the interviews, but then it just had to be molded to achieve the end result. After that initial work-through of the first transcript, it was really very straightforward and almost fun to hone it into the final manuscript.

4. In the foreword of the book, which Mary wrote, she says that you have a reserved demeanor and that her curiosity about you was a main factor motivating her to commission the project. Kevin, was there anything particular about creating a memoir that made it easier to open up and share your stories and insights with others? And Mary, how did the memoir satisfy your curiosity?

Kevin Albert: Well, you don’t really have any choice but to open up, right? Megan interviews you, and if you don’t answer the questions, you’re shooting the entire project in the foot because the process itself forces you to be responsive. Mary hasn’t ever been involved in the business world, particularly finance. I think that the main thing that she has always been trying to figure out is what I did every day for ten hours! I think some of that came through in this project with the specific things I cited, like creating the structure of a business development company for the first time. What readers should get out of the memoir is that I developed something that became a big deal on Wall Street, and that’s probably all they need to know. In a couple of instances, I helped either develop or create something that wasn’t there before and is still used today. I talk about how those things came about and I think that’s helpful. I also think it’s helpful that I included commentary on some of my colleagues who helped me in my career. Mary knew some of these people, and the memoir helped her to see them from a new perspective.

Mary Albert: Kevin and I have been married for 35 years and I have pretty much learned to understand his personality and behavior. He’s a man who keeps his feelings pretty close to his chest and has seemed reluctant to show nostalgia or reminisce. Through the memoir I learned so much about his earlier days and the many happy and interesting events of his life before we met. His genealogy record was fascinating. I just wish I had access to my own!

5. As your interest in learning more about your family history became sparked by the memoir-writing process, you expanded the project to have us conduct genealogical research. We presented the results in an extensive appendix in your memoir, as well as an online family tree. The appendix included a five-generation ancestor chart, a series of research summaries, photos and images of key historical documents, and an introduction that provided historical context. How did the genealogical research enhance the project for you?

Kevin Albert: I had never focused on family history at all, beyond recalling things my parents would drop on a one-off basis that I never pursued. Writing a memoir caused me to have more intellectual curiosity about my heritage and to see this curiosity satisfied. I’ve actually had a few people I don’t know reach out to me because they are linked into the DNA and family tree tools on the online family genealogy site.

Most importantly, however, is that the genealogy is very interesting to, say, a cousin who I haven’t seen in twenty years. It enhances the book for extended family who might read the family history section of the book and then also look to the first part for information or curiosity about me. “This guy that grew up in Wisconsin with us moved to New York—then what happened?” I would assume that if three generations from now, someone got really interested in our family history, it would be much harder to go back to find the information we documented from the 19th century and earlier. There are now enough copies of this book floating around in the family that the information will be there for anyone to use. I’m very happy to have done it and I talk it up whenever I can to people. There are other people in my network who certainly would have a story that is at least as interesting to tell.

Reflections from Prosper Ishimwe

Prosper Ishimwe published his book entitled Neither Tutsi, nor Hutu: A Rwandan Memoir; My Search for Healing, Meaning, and Identity after Witnessing Genocide and Surviving Civil War with Modern Memoirs in 2020. This Assisted Memoir took seven months from the day he first contacted us to the day books arrived on Prosper’s doorstep and eBook conversion was completed. We asked Prosper to reflect on what the publication process was like for him, and what it’s meant to share his books with others.

 —Liz Sonnenberg

 1. There were other ways for you to convey your story—podcast, documentary, public speaking. Why was it important to you to write your story in a book?

 Prosper Ishimwe: I love books, and I love writing, so I naturally gravitate towards books and writing. I never considered other ways I could share my story. I wrote so I could make sense of my past traumas, heal, and also exhume the stories of the people I cared for who died in the genocide and civil war. In hindsight, writing down my thoughts and feelings allowed me to see myself. Reading my thoughts and feelings on paper allowed me to be self-aware, as if I was looking at myself in the mirror. Sometimes, we say things in ways that we do not mean them. Writing allows one a chance to go back and convey what they said in a way they really meant.

2. Some people wait until their senior years to write a memoir, but you wrote yours in your early thirties. How does that make this book different from the one you might have written later?

 Prosper Ishimwe: Survival comes with a responsibility. Ironically, tragedy often gives us purpose. I felt a responsibility to heal myself and hopefully inspire other people who have experienced similar traumas to also heal themselves. I did not want to wait until I was older to live my purpose. I strangely felt like—I imagine—a woman who’s pregnant. One way or the other the baby has to come out. As much as writing my memoir was intentional, when I started writing I just couldn’t stop. And after finishing the manuscript, I knew I had to publish it.

 3. You say that writing your book was the most rewarding experience of those three decades of your life. Why is that so?

 Prosper Ishimwe: Living traumatic experiences often makes us feel trapped in the past. Writing was the only way I knew how to liberate myself and make peace with the past.

Prosper Ishimwe

 4. What was the greatest struggle you encountered while writing your memoir?

 Prosper Ishimwe: Writing was not challenging at all. Navigating the publishing world was the most challenging part because it was my first book.

 5. You explored publishing your book commercially. Why did you choose to self-publish in the end?

 Prosper Ishimwe: I chose self-publishing because I realized it was the only way I could write my memoir the way I wanted it to be written, and not in a way it would sell best.

 6. In several places in the book, you discuss the idea of “interpreting” life events. In one chapter you write, “I reclaimed the power to decide how to react and interpret the traumatic experiences I had gone through.” What is the role of memoir writing in the interpretation process?

 Prosper Ishimwe: Writing a memoir was a very therapeutic experience for me, and I suspect it is for many people. Writing allowed me to look at the thoughts and feelings that came from within me, and gave me the opportunity to find a healthier and more truthful way to interpret them. In hindsight, it was a form of self-cognitive behavioral therapy. It’s easier to organize and make sense of one’s thoughts and feelings once they can see them written down. That’s what made writing my memoir a therapeutic experience.

Interested in reading more? Readers can purchase Prosper’s book at the link below: